Gen. David C. Jones, Former Chairman of Joint Chiefs, Dies at 92

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. David C. Jones in 1978. Under his watch, a mission to rescue the American hostages in Iran in 1980 ended in disaster.Credit
Associated Press

Gen. David C. Jones, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Carter and Reagan administrations helped set in motion a sweeping reorganization of the nation’s military command, died on Saturday in Potomac Falls, Va. He was 92.

The cause was Parkinson’s disease, his daughter Kathy Franklin said in confirming the death on Wednesday. The general had lived in a military retirement community in Potomac Falls.

General Jones served longer than any predecessor on the Joint Chiefs, first as the Air Force chief of staff (1974-78) and then as chairman (1978-82). It was under his watch during the Carter administration that a mission to rescue 53 American hostages in Iran ended in disaster.

General Jones was a bomber pilot in the Korean War, but he represented a new generation of officers whose rise in the military hierarchy owed more to their administrative and strategic planning skills than to their combat exploits.

In “Four Stars,” his history of the Joint Chiefs published in 1989, Mark Perry wrote that General Jones had earned a reputation as “a good service manager” who “welcomed change” when he was selected as Air Force chief of staff by President Richard M. Nixon in 1974.

“Jones looked and acted the part of an Air Force general — a much more important quality for an officer who appears with frequency before Congressional committees than many people will admit,” Mr. Perry wrote. “In fact, Jones — tall, athletic, with a deep voice and just a tad bowlegged (a dead ringer for Burt Lancaster) — seemed the perfect choice.”

Early in 1982, near the end of his second two-year term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Jones proposed far-reaching changes aimed at enhancing the chairman’s influence while curbing interservice rivalry. Though his proposals drew opposition, the military reorganization he envisioned became a reality through an act of Congress in 1986.

Behind the legislation were concerns over divided military command authority arising from the 1983 invasion of Grenada and the failed hostage-rescue mission.

The Iran debacle, in April 1980, was an especially humiliating blow to American prestige. Of the eight American helicopters sent on the mission, three broke down early in its first stages during a sandstorm. After the mission had been called off, one of the remaining helicopters collided on the ground with a transport plane and both craft burned. Eight servicemen died in the fire.

Afterward, at a news conference with General Jones, Defense Secretary Harold Brown said that “the mission was complex and difficult” but that “it was the judgment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and myself that it was operationally feasible.”

The New York Times reported in December 1980 that some Republican senators were known to have asserted in private that General Jones should have resigned after the abortive mission.

Ronald Reagan made the failure an issue in his successful 1980 campaign to deny Mr. Carter a second term. The hostages were not released until the day of Mr. Reagan’s inauguration, 444 days after they were taken captive.

Photo

Gen. David C. Jones, left, and Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger arrive to testify before the House Armed Services Committee in 1981.Credit
John Duricka/Associated Press

Conservative Republicans in Congress further criticized General Jones for supporting Mr. Carter’s cancellation of the Air Force B-1 bomber project, for backing the administration’s Panama Canal treaties and for endorsing its negotiations aimed at a strategic arms agreement with the Soviet Union.

General Jones said he had felt a constitutional obligation to voice support for his civilian superiors in public no matter what advice he might have given privately. He was kept on by President Reagan until his retirement in July 1982, when he completed his second term as chairman.

By then General Jones had begun his effort to reorganize the interservice command structure. In the past, the five members — a chairman, who could come from any of the services, and the top commanders of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines — had tried to achieve unanimity in making recommendations to the president. But the united-front approach was criticized as a recipe for compromise among services competing for missions at the expense of well-conceived plans.

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“Someone once wrote that long-term planning is almost anti-American,” General Jones told The New York Times in February 1982. “We have not done as well as other countries in long-term planning. That’s true in government, it’s true in business, and it’s true in the military.”

General Jones introduced his proposals in a 1982 article for the management journal Directors & Boards and in interviews with reporters covering military issues. It was a rare public campaign for change by an active-duty military officer.

Elements of the Navy as well as President Reagan’s defense secretary, Caspar W. Weinberger, opposed General Jones’s ideas, contending that the system long in place was satisfactory. But the general was ultimately backed by a presidential commission headed by David Packard, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard who was a deputy defense secretary in the Nixon administration.

After much wrangling, Congress passed the Goldwater-Nichols Act in 1986. Sponsored by Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, a Republican, and Representative Bill Nichols of Alabama, a Democrat, the legislation designated the Joint Chiefs chairman as the principal military adviser to the president and the secretary of defense, a change from the old policy in which all five members made recommendations.

The act strengthened the chairman’s role in drafting military strategy and devising the Pentagon’s budgets; it created a new position, vice chairman, and it gave important new powers to commanders who would lead mixed forces — land, sea and air — into battle.

David Charles Jones was born on July 9, 1921, in Aberdeen, S.D. As a youngster, he moved with his family to Minot, N.D., where he rode his bicycle to a nearby airport to watch planes land and take off. He attended the University of North Dakota and Minot State College before joining the Army Air Corps in April 1942.

He was a flight instructor at stateside bases during World War II and saw combat for the first time in the Korean War, flying more than 300 hours of bombing missions. He later commanded bomber and tanker squadrons, served at Strategic Air Command headquarters in Nebraska, was vice commander of the Seventh Air Force in Vietnam and commanded the United States Air Forces in Europe before being elevated to Air Force chief of staff in 1974.

Besides his daughter Ms. Franklin, he is survived by a son, David Curtis Jones; another daughter, Susan Coffin; a sister, Jean Brown; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. His wife of 67 years, Lois Tarbell Jones, died in 2009.

General Jones continued his campaign for military reforms after leaving the Joint Chiefs. Writing in The Times in November 1982, he noted that the military services “find it difficult to adapt to changing conditions because of understandable attachments to the past.”

He recalled a chat with President Reagan.

“At a late-afternoon meeting at the White House a few months ago, President Reagan, who had just returned from horseback riding at Quantico, turned to me in jest, but with a touch of nostalgia, and asked, ‘Isn’t there some way we can bring back the horse cavalry?’ My reply was: ‘Just wait, Mr. President. We are starting by resurrecting battleships.’ ”

A version of this article appears in print on August 15, 2013, on Page B16 of the New York edition with the headline: Gen. David C. Jones Is Dead at 92; Former Chairman of Joint Chiefs. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe